James Hansen

Update: As of mid October, 2015, this video has received nearly 170,000 hits on the UCSB TV website. Academy President Rinaldo S. Brutoco presents “Nuclear Power: A Mistake in Search of a Mission,” at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Walter H. Capps Center for the study of ethics, religion and public life. Brutoco mentions […]

From a business perspective, private investors should be seen as the ultimate ”referees” on competing energy choices, using informed diligence and prudent criteria to determine which energy technologies can compete in the market with the best chance of generating revenues and profits. As Amory Lovins points out, the capital markets have already spoken. Private investors and project finance lenders have flatly rejected large base-load nuclear power plants and have enthusiastically embraced supply-side competitors, decentralized cogeneration, and renewables.

Nuclear power is not the answer to our energy needs or the climate change crisis. Nuclear power plants produce more greenhouse gas emission than wind, and certainly fewer than coal, but that is not the issue. Building new nuclear plants to try to reduce carbon emissions would irrevocably commit the world to a plutonium economy, […]